Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Snark To Be Protected By EPA

Theory: the left and the multiculti and pomo crowd is basically driven by basic unhappiness of life. They imagine they need to protect the beautiful snarks, which are so mercilessly hunted to near-extinction (by the usual hated lot).

This has got to stop, they essentially declare, because the snark is the symbol of what they strive for – miniscule beauty and happiness that is not so much seen as desired and imagined by them, of society of equality, equity, fair trade, social justice, beautiful landscapes, etc. Snark is an endangered species! Social justice is hated and destroyed deliberately by the capitalists!

Real-world capitalists: eh?

Certainly, if there were only three snarks left alive in the world, and hunting snarks required special $45 million gun, capitalists would fall over each other to sell such gun to anybody who's willing to pay so much money. The snark would not inspire them enough to prevent them from sellling the snark gun. Besides, if they don't sell the gun, somebody else will, right? (right, Prisoner's Dilemma mandates that it doesn't matter how anybody perceives the act of making and selling such gun, it is guaranteed that somebody would be eventually willing to sell it – that you don't like the answer doesn't have to mean it's untrue)

Nevertheless, none of the capitalists has deliberately smashed either the social justice in the world or potential for it, because social justice, its development and potential for it remain wishful thinking. Nobody has seen it so far and has the faintest idea how to construct this artificial, plastic dream that is as genuine as crappy PVC folklore memorabilia sold at the lamest tourist hangouts, even though a billion wet-dreamers cry in their pillows every day for it. Neither we are progressing towards the social justice, because heavy taxation with govt spending modelled along socialist dreams is not social justice, it is merely yet another form of government and not any change in social relations or in human nature as supposed product of nurture (a point that cannot be repeated often enough). Capitalists do not need to kill 'social justice', even if they were intelligent enough to realize what's going on, and they're not (businessmen rank average in intelligence tests, in between the proles and the specialists). Capitalists are neither in danger of being shredded to pieces by enraged, wounded snark.

Nobody has ever seen snark, but you can't prove beyond any doubt it can't exist, can you? The snark remains a potential like social justice remains a potential. All they need now is motivation, and that is provided in a stash of million gunpowder kegs of being bored with plain old truth, unbearable lightness of existence, and all the suffering that life brings, to induce them into foaming-at-mouth, blind-rage mutiny against the reality wanting to erase it all:

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,

Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply

"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

But we've got our brave Captain to thank"

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best--

A perfect and absolute blank!"

(Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark)

In reality what they pursue is pure illusion. The map isn't blank and it wasn't filled by arbitrary signs of Western civilization. The shapes and artifacts were already there, they were just cultivated a bit, true. They are willing to ruin a good thing of Western civilization for sake of gaining nothing but failure. A multiculti experiment is right now going belly up with ugly consequences, but that is very unlikely to change their minds in any other area, like feminism or social justice. If what you pursue has to be fiction, the reality is unlikely to deter you: any failures and evidence to the contrary are interpreted as “we have not tried hard enough”.

Interestingly, the pursuers of ideal and perfect nationalism, nation as pure essence of national “spirit”, also fall into this trap. Arguably, the cultural code of particular nation does exist, e.g. “originalist streak” of American nation (always coming back to “what Constitution means” with stubborness of a mule – this tendency obviously makes American progressives weep in despair), or deductive thinking of Germans. Nevertheless, it's an error to remake it into some nationalist phlogiston that in its ideal form would motivate and power everything, like otherwise interesting Polish writer Glowacki wrote “even livestock and kitchenware should be made national in nature” (not: nationalized as in taken economically by the nation-state, but rather remade according to national-cultural code of the nation).

Culture isn't an embodiment of a single idea or factor. This is oversimplified sociology of nation. Nobody would admit using such if formulated explicitly, but somehow people do not have a problem with thinking and arguing as if it applied. In practice, a nation is an amalgam of past influences, foreign not being somehow distinguishable from domestic influences. Nations borrow, steal, adopt, reject, mutate, digest, vomit, export and compile the widest and wildest influences (consider worldwide career of Japanese manga aesthetics). That some persisting “national cultural taste and ontology” arguably exists doesn't mean that it's one and only factor that entire culture grows out from. Thinking so is a vulgar oversimplification, akin to deriving about everything in history from a single idee fixe (a manic obsession with a single idea to the detriment of consideration of any other factor) of class warfare, whereas other factors may be way more powerful. Vilfredo Pareto gave Marx many a sleepless nights over this problem.

Multiculties paradoxically share such Platonic traits with extreme nationalism understood as system of thought.

That's where pursue of ideals leads in practice: to distorting and vulgarizing your system of concepts and knowledge (aka ontology) and trying to base everything on a single factor, e.g. on hatred to capitalism or, more subtly, on being driven desperate by life.

Trying to put such doctrines in practice results in horror at worst or self-destruction at best, as we've seen the “deconstructivist” trying to demolish existing culture not for intellectual reasons, but due to clearly visible hatred and loathing of the critics of Western culture as it exists. “Hey ho, Western culture has to go” is not an expression of intellectual criticism, but of emotional syndrome. Such people are boiling with hate and raving, not arguing because they feel they have some valid points to make. The latter is merely a rationalization for the former.

The big question is whether the immunological system of the the West will be capable of neutralizing and killing such irrational tendencies, like immunological system of human body finds and kills cancerous cells. If not, the critics, like parasites, will die along the host's body, not even realizing how they killed themselves.

Not that it would bring any of their beloved dreams to ultimately happen. Depraved of protection that the Western order provides for individuals against nutty leftie coteries, society would fall apart into myriad tough groups akin to those gathered around feudal castles in the past, each of those specific, based on extended patriarchal family or particular trade such as tree cutting (practiced mercilessly and without any consideration for long term consequences whatsoever) and almost always hierarchical, each of those groups and tribes for themselves and nobody overlooking them all.

Then, it would not be like police using pepper spray on faces of ecoprotesters in Eureka, California. Instead, the lumberjacks would machinegun the protesters. There would be nobody to stop even a feckless lumberjack in women's clothing and hanging around in bars from doing just that. They don't like the pepper spray? How about receiving .50 cal bullets instead and no police around to prevent that from happening? The left is undermining political consensus maintaining their protection without realizing so for the gain of short-term “victories” using lawyers that are, heh, progressively more detached from reality by the day.

Sometimes I almost wish for all that to happen. For far too long the people have taken the civilized life for granted. Let them taste the so-called 'mother' nature. They would then quickly find it tastes mostly of teeth or lead. Let'em eat the lead.